Are poker players liberal or conservative?

Much like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman with his taxi drivers, I’m at risk of overindexing on political opinions that I hear at the poker table. You’ll certainly encounter a wide cross-section of views. Poker players might be guarded when it comes to revealing information about their hands, but they sometimes take a no-fucks-given attitude toward the rest of their lives, including often violating the dictum not to talk about politics around strangers.

However, I know that poker players are not a representative sample of pretty much anything. Although the industry is diverse in some narrow ways, attracting people of all ages and nationalities, poker is a highly unusual profession. My guess is that there are only a few thousand professional poker players in the United States, some of whom are fooling themselves about their abilities. Poker is also notably non-diverse in other respects: typical tournament fields are about 95 percent male.

Nevertheless, as one of the few well-known people in the overlap in the Venn diagram between politics and poker, I feel like it’s my duty to Silver Bulletin readers to address a minor controversy on Twitter. So, instead of trying to rush out a longer item I’ve been working on about AI on the day before Thanksgiving, let’s tackle a question that I’m perhaps uniquely qualified to answer.

Yesterday, Josh Barro expressed surprise that NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is a poker player, at least according to comments made on CNN by Mike Lawler, the Republican Congressman from New York’s 17th Congressional District. “Poker is not very left-coded,” Josh wrote.

I’m a big fan of Barro and his newsletter, and had a lot of fun recently on his podcast with cohosts Ben Dreyfuss and Megan McArdle. And what he says dovetails with the thesis from my book. Occupations associated with what I call the River — so analytical, competitive, risk-taking professions — have become more conservative-coded in recent years.

This perhaps even creates political problems for Democrats. In 2024, they lost a lot of ground with young men, who are often the primary customers for crypto, poker, sports betting, day trading, prediction markets, and other pastimes where you put money behind your opinions. Democrats may also alienate other constituencies like small-business owners when they behave like nits who take an overly prescriptive approach